Network appliances such as routers, hubs, firewalls, file servers, and the like, are often disposed in a physical location such as a data center where access is typically restricted to authorized personnel. To increase the number of network appliances that can be located in a data center, several network appliances may be positioned in a vertical rack and several of these racks are often disposed in the data center. Also, a cable that is directly connected to some computing device such as a desktop computer or a notebook computer or a wired network interface such as Ethernet is typically employed for configuring and/or managing the operation of each network appliance.
Additionally, since physical access in a data center to a network appliance is often difficult due to space constraints, it is often difficult to identify a particular network appliance and install a separate cable for configuring and/or managing its operation.